In Transit
by Khevsureti
Summary: A short story written for a forum contest. Barney Calhoun at work with Civil Protection.


The coffee here is awful.

At first it was just Bremen and his AA batteries, scavenged from a dismembered karaoke machine that only played Soviet bloc kitsch. He would brew an illicit pot or two to get us through the late shift on tertiary days. Just something to put a little bounce in your jackboot as you squeaked around the platform zapping the scaly janitors. The trainstation was, and still is, a shambles, and we could get away with extracurricular stuff like that.

Then Bremen got caught, of course. And unfortunately for the rest of us, instead of just busting him down to citizen rations for a few weeks, the pile of silicone that calls itself the boss cop had a revelation about the Biologically Progressive effects of caffeine on the Civilly Protective organism. And so now we are faced with the choice of going cold turkey, or imbibing an acrid intravenous cocktail of caffeine-like stimulants at every Fifth Siren. Apparently the administration can understand the mental effects of the compound, but lacks the human insight to realize no one drinks their goddamn coffee at noon. The worst part is that even though you drink the stuff through a needle in your forearm, it has a taste like bullsquid caviar.

Unit Pb-9 chortles as I tell him that. I flick the IV back into the sanitary tub and we walk out of the breakroom. Down at ground level, a train rattles to a halt on the platform. Cue Dr. Breen's welcome speech. Forty tons of rusty metal and green paint passing through the particle barriers puts a strain on the power supply, and the lights in the hallway flicker. Or that's the explanation I bullied Li-5 into giving the higher-ups when he went to examine this sector's power hub. I know the real reason for the electrical disturbances, and that's why I always trade in my alcohol ration. Otherwise who knows what I'd say.

"Calhoun! You forgot your mask again, you dandy! Command would lay an egg if they saw that haircut." Pb-9 points at the skeletal gas mask that's still swinging from my belt.

"They aren't going to like you using Biotic Nomenclature, either." My voice turns guttural and plunges in pitch as the helmet latch clicks shut, initializing the vocoder. "Learn the rest of the unit's call-codes already. You've been here for weeks."

"Sranje!" His Balkan accent is downright sinister when put through the air filter. "I tried memorizing that crap last night. Can't handle it. It's like school all over again."

"Then just start with the meatheads on our late shift, and get the rest down later. There's nothing else to do that early in the morning." The bannister disappeared from the shadowy stairwell last week, and I drag my gloves along the wall as we descend, triggering a shower of paint chips.

"Yeah, only last time you complained how boring it was, that train full of corpses turned up. I still can't believe the terrorists managed to hit the railway so hard."

Kleiner was incensed about that particular incident. Those renegade Resistance fighters killed enough citizens in the crossfire to cut Underground Railroad traffic in half. We can't afford PR that bad.

Brakes hiss as we step onto the platform, like an intake of breath. The trains are frightened of us. Scanners descend from the vaulted glass ceiling, barely visible against the washed-out background of the sky. The wind has been easterly all week, which means no sun and a high-altitude current of fog that smells like Kleiner's chemistry set. Most of the new arrivals get sick as soon as they set foot outside their carriages, and we beat anyone who vomits. The Vorts have thicker skin, so we taser them as they mop it up. I hope the weather gets better soon.

Pb-9 aims a kick at someone passing by and does his best dime novel villain laugh. When he's not wearing his helmet, he's a rather effeminate-looking fellow with bad teeth. I think he was a rapist back in the old world, but that sort of thing isn't physically possible anymore, so his heart isn't really in the violence. Civil Protection only appeals to a certain kind of bully.

Like me. I made my mark the first day on the job, tearing into a Vortigaunt with a stun baton until it fell unconscious. We had a prior arrangement and alien hearts can withstand the voltage, but I was still terrified by how easy the torture was. That display established my reputation, and now no one notices that I've gone soft since. It's really just a matter of forgetting everything that happens on the other side of your eyeholes, and chanting the call-code they gave you. Mg-13, Mg-13, Mg-13.

"Psst! Calhoun! What's your number?"

"Thirteen, damnit. Listen, I've got console duty until sirenseven. See you on tert."

I really don't think he gets it when I call him dumber than lead.

"Regards, Md-13."

See what I mean?

Nowadays I mostly have console duty. Computer stuff. Times like these it pays to have half a college education, and the only CPs more educated than me are those ex-Air Force types in the control room.

Console duty is what I get in return for my alcohol ration. It's easy, it's lonely (therefore safe) and most of all I'm not expected to beat anyone into bloody pulp. The computer room is an airless chamber sandwiched between the platforms, the waiting areas and the central hall of the station. There aren't any windows, just a skylight far above. A scanner is scheduled to fly overhead and shine a light through the glass every twenty-seven minutes, but depending on the wind speed it can be up to two minutes late. The Combine have very accurate clocks, and watching them is often my only entertainment.

The crowd of disembarking transfers melts away before me as I walk. They know to steer clear, leaving a bubble of empty space with a radius exactly the reach of my stun baton. Most of this lot are Americans, which is becoming more and more common these days. It doesn't make me feel at home. If anything, being able to understand their hushed exchanges just makes my job harder. Hearing a strong New Mexico accent one put me in enough of a funk to drink my booze when it was doled out.

I'm making my way towards the Breenscreen when a long peal of thunder ripples through the station. No, wait, that's not thunder. Suddenly the roof of the station is getting walloped by solid, continuous sheets of hail. It is absolutely deafening, hammering on the glass panels like a cascade of ball bearings and pig iron. From behind me I can hear the ice hitting high notes as it strikes the rails and box cars.

The scanners are driven out of their minds, completely overwhelmed by these unfamiliar inputs. They can't decide if they are in danger or in the presence of something subversive, so they just swoop at people's heads, chirping and wailing. It's complete mayhem inside and out, but the humans mostly act stunned. Everyone on my shift stares at the ceiling, fixated by the most interesting thing to happen in days. Most of them are shocked that this world has anything left to show them. They forget to confiscate the citizens' luggage, and suitcases by the dozen are getting past the turnstile, here and there heavy trunks pushed bodily through the rotating bars.

I guess somewhere God snapped his fingers, because the hail stops just like that. No trail-off of straggler ice pellets, just immediate silence. The scanners are still croaking though, and they sound so idiotic that someone laughs. He even gets away with it.

A train begins backing up, and I feel a little bit like I am floating somewhere above my helmet. It's a familiar sensation owing to the narrow field of vision, but I think today it has more to do with the hailstorm. The utterly unexpected has changed the atmosphere of the station, breaking through the usual oppressive tension. It all feels more alien than the scaly hooved fellow with the red eye and pectal arm sweeping up trash to my left. Actually, I recognize the scar on the Vort's flank. I call him Frank.

Sticking my head through the spidery blue mosaic of a particle field clears up the feeling. A horsefly on the collar of my tunic is recognized as Foreign Organic Matter and gets squished all to hell until the paste is thinly-spread enough to pass through the barrier. Now the freak weather just seems anticlimactic. It should have been heralding _something. _Or maybe some guy out there in the crowd had an epiphany that I'm not party to, and that bizarre product of our ruined climate was meant for him. Really, what sort of unsavory toxic shit must be floating around at 30,000 feet for something like that to happen? Eli thinks that half the Eurasian Steppe has turned into chemical slurry and flowed away, but has no way of confirming the hypothesis.

The console control room has a two-way swinging door like you used to see in restaurant kitchens, and it always sticks. I once got so frustrated with it that I juiced up my stun baton and gave the handle a good wallop, starting a flash fire from dust and lint. This time it only takes a good kick.

Well, this is interesting.

The hail has broken the skylight, and the floor is spread thinly with shattered glass and thickly with ice droplets. The stuff isn't quite the color of normal hail; there are enough pollutants in it to effect a faint blue tint. It's also slippery as hell, with plenty of nasty lacerations waiting for me on the floor.

I scuff my boots across the tile like a skier. What a mess. The switchboard and key panel are covered in ice, and it sparkles in the glow of the monitor. There is a whole spectrum of color in the shards, winking at me from the dark. The scanner arrives from the roof right on schedule and is not at all put off by the damage. Poof goes the flash bulb, its light rebounding in a thousand watery mirrors. Glass is technically a liquid too, Alyx once pointed out. We were replacing some century-old panes of glass that had dripped down into themselves, becoming wider at the base.

"To work, to work." I clear the controls as best I can, and the debris falls to the floor with a whole range of crystalline notes. Now to log in.

"And we thought Windows XP was bad..."

I talk to myself at the work station a lot. Would you believe it, it's a habit I picked up from Kleiner. Or rather, a habit I broke as a child that relapsed upon extended contact with that mad scientist. BS, MS, PHD: Bullshit, More Shit, Piled Higher and Deeper.

Heh. Sorry, Doc.

"And I'm in."

Last year they fed the Dispatcher into the network, just in case we didn't get enough of that bitch's disjointed metal voice already.

"Initializing... Assimilating, Unit Mg-13. Pedigree. Barney Calhoun."

I've heard her drone on with that sentence a hundred times by this point. Alyx couldn't believe how I gave them my real name when I joined the force, but hey, they're not going to steal my social security number or anything.

"U...emjee. One-Three PC. Authorized. Stand by for motive forecast audit."

That means running down the list of incoming citizen transfers for the next CentCycle. Each one has to be manually accepted by the City 17 department, then checked against our census to make sure the database will accept the newcomers, and that they haven't been sent here ahead of schedule. There's not another intelligent being anywhere else in the process, so we always have to verify the network's decisions. When a name doesn't fit quite right, the person attached to it generally gets sent through two chainlink fences to Nova Prospekt on a train from hell, so I take this part of the job seriously.

The screen flickers momentarily. Another power shortage? If Kleiner keeps drawing on the grid so much, someone is going to notice. At least the glorified calculator that runs this clockwork city from the Citadel will remain forever oblivious.

A counter-intuitive sequence of keystrokes later, and the screen begins to fill with names. They ascend in two columns, displaying first initial, surname, numerical ID, city of origin and finally date of arrival. Another job I have is making sure the ID numbers of the Latin alphabet entries on the left match their Cyrillic counterparts on the right. For all Breen's Anglicizing efforts, City 17 still has two lingua francas.

There are a lot of names this time around, something about the biome in City 21 (pretty sure that's Frankfurt) collapsing. The room has a strange smell as all the ice melts. Every now and then a bit of glass makes a tinkling sound from beneath the liquefying hail, and that strange feeling of pregnant expectation returns.

I quick-scroll down past the end of the list and—what the hell was that?

I let out a nervous laugh. Maybe should have taken a bit more of the caffeine drip. Because that can't be.

Had there been a pallid _face_ when the screen flashed white?

Inexplicably reluctant, I climb back towards the list's final entries, just to admonish my eyes for playing tricks on me.

F. Ierusalimskaia... E. Kusturica... D. Miller... C. van Ghent...

There.

Is my helmet malfunctioning? Am I losing air supply? There's a tingling feeling all over my back, as if some of that ice slipped down under my uniform.

It's just a coincidence, must be a coincidence, and that's the only remotely rational—

But no.

The entry in the center of the screen, shining a soft electronic light all around the room to light up a constellation of wet glass, is plain as day.

Instead of the usual City notation, from one to fifty-seven, it very clearly reads Black Mesa, New Mexico.

Unique Identification Code JP[1-409-005]

G. Freeman


End file.
